emained with him. In all he wrote there enters some of the material,
native and foreign, out of which Romanticism was made.

To the true masters of English fiction his indebtedness was equally
large, exception made perhaps for Fielding and Smollett; and one
American author should be included in the acknowledgment. Goldsmith,
Sterne, Walter Scott, and Fenimore Cooper were his delight. The first
and last of Richardson's productions he read only when his own talent
was formed. _Pamela_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_ he chanced upon in a
library at Ajaccio; and, after running them through, pronounced them
to be horribly stupid and boring. But _Clarissa Harlowe_, on the
contrary, he highly esteemed. Already in 1821 he had studied it; and,
when composing his _Pierrette_, towards the end of the thirties, he
spoke of it as a magnificent poem, in a passage which brands the
procedure of certain hypocrites, their oratorical precautions, and
their involved conversations, wherein the mind obscures the light it
throws and honeyed speech dilutes the venom of intentions. The phrase,
says Monsieur Le Breton, in his well-reasoned book on Balzac, is that
of a man who was conversant with the patient analysis, the
conscientious and minute realism of this great painter of English
life. In Monsieur Le Breton's opinion, Balzac's long-windedness is, in
a measure, due to Richardson, who reacted upon him by his defects no
less than by his excellencies.

Throughout Balzac's correspondence, as throughout his novels, there
are numerous remarks which are so many confessions of the hints he
received in the course of his English readings. In one passage he
exclaims: "The villager is an admirable nature. When he is stupid, he
is just the animal; but, when he has good points, they are exquisite.
Unfortunately, no one observes him. It needed a lucky hazard for
Goldsmith to create his _Vicar of Wakefield_." Elsewhere he says:
"Generally, in fiction, an author succeeds only by the number of his
characters and the variety of his situations; and there are few
examples of novels having but two or three _dramatis personae_
depending on a single situation. Of such a kind, _Caleb Williams_, the
celebrated Godwin's masterpiece, is in our time the only work known,
and its interest is prodigious."

Sterne, even more than Scott, was Balzac's favourite model. Allusions
to him abound in the _Comedie Humaine_. _Tristram Shandy_ the novelist
appears to have had at his fi